Sony Introduces Ferrari The Race Experience, Hits PSN Tomorrow

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Today Chandra Nair has introduced Ferrari The Race Experience via Sony's PlayStation Blog, and confirmed that the racing simulation video game will be hitting PSN tomorrow.

To quote: Beginning with Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli back in 2008 System 3 wanted to allow players to experience the raw power of the F430 Challenge and the massive challenge that comes with harnessing that power and keeping it together under pressure.

We won't lie; learning how to drive a proper racing machine is no simple task, but once you've mastered it you'll never be able to go back to 'arcade' mode ever again.

Ferrari The Race Experience takes that racing mantra and expands it in every way. The first thing we did with Ferrari The Race Experience was to create a fictional Career mode that allowed you to participate with whichever Ferrari you have in your Showroom. Now you have three racing series covering 'Classics' cars, 'Road' cars and 'GT' cars.

Each type of car brings with it completely different challenges. Classics cars are extremely raw. Steering is tough, braking is early and acceleration is sluggish but everyone is under the same conditions. You are what you are and the only way to win is to be focused and consistent.

Road cars have great tyres, power steering and traction control but, ultimately, they're designed for the road. The brakes aren't very powerful and the tyres simply aren't designed to take corners at ridiculous speeds.

And then you have the Race cars. The pinnacles of modern engineering, these cars turn on a coin, hug the road and have very powerful brakes. But lose focus for a split-second and your race could be over. All that engineering means nothing if you clip the wrong part of the curb and send the back end into a spin.

The great thing about all these cars is that GP2 legend and current F1 driver Bruno Senna set up the handling of every single one.

Heading up the Career is the awesome new 458 Italia. You've probably seen it either in newspapers, on Top Gear or online, and if you've watched our latest trailer you'll see a few of them in there too. Actually, there's a funny little story attached to the trailer for the game...

A few of the guys spent weeks storyboarding the trailer before it then went onto be modelled, textured, rendered etc. There was a core team of people who were involved in the entire process but a large chunk of the team had seen absolutely nothing. When the final trailer had been finished we had a little viewing for the entire team. The first, rather irate response was: "Erm, so when did you decide to go to a track day without telling us!?"

The guys thought the CG trailer was footage from a real race! The next day we had Ferrari in and their team also couldn't understand how we'd filmed a race with all these different cars in it. In order to convince them otherwise we had to create a wireframe version of the movie and overlay it on top of the textured movie, and that's one of the production movies that we recently released.

Funnily enough this movie represents the type of realism that we're already working on for our next graphics engine. We feel it's time to radically improve the aesthetics, and the trailer is a sign of things to come a few years down the line.

Since we released Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli we feel we've been on a journey and there are an awful lot of loyal fans who have been on that journey with us.

That's the main reason why we've put a loyalty scheme in place to thank those fans. If you owned the last game on PS3 then you can get Ferrari The Race Experience for £9.99/€12.99 and the full price is £11.99 /€14.99.

That's it for now. We'll be updating you with more details about the game in our next blog and we'll also be around to answer your questions.